THE WORLD OF THEATRE:

TRADITION AND INNOVATION

2006

Mira Felner, Hunter College of The City University of New York

Claudia Orenstein, Hunter College of The City University of New York

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The Audience

P artners in P erformance

More intimate than many modern theatres, Heisei Nakamura-zas

reconstructed Edo period kabuki theatre brings audience members seated
near the rampway close enough to reach out and touch the actor making
his way to the stage. From his vantage point, the actor can take in the entire
audience. The Summer Festival performed at Lincoln Center, New York.
Stephanie Berger

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The Audience and the Actor: The Invisible Bond

The Audience Is a Community
Audience Members Construct Meaning as Individuals
Personal Identity and the Construction of Meaning

Audience Members Choose Focus

Conventions of Audience Response
Audience Conventions in Western Theatre History
The Once-Active Audience
The Rise of the Passive Audience
Rebelling against Realisms Passive Audience

Political Theatre: Moving the Audience to Action

Agit-Prop: Activating the Audience
Bertolt Brecht: Challenging the Audience
Augusto Boal: Involving the Audience
The Living Theatre: Confronting the Audience
Engaging the Audience Today

From P rovocation to Mainstream: The Evolution

of a Convention
Meeting Theatres Challenges

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To go to the theatre is to experience the special excitement of live performance and

to enter into a new set of relationships with actors, a performance, and the spectators
that surround you. As you wait for the event to begin, in all likelihood it has not entered
your head that the actors have also been waiting for you. All of their work has been in
anticipation of your response. The performers need you to be there, and if you and everyone in the audience suddenly vanished leaving an empty theatre, there would be no performance. Your presence is vital to the theatre experience itself, for the most essential
component of the theatre is the live actoraudience interaction with all its stimulation
and surprise.

History

IN PERSPECTIVE

THE ORIGINS OF THEATRE

he need to tell a story, to imitate, to play, and to

perform repeated acts that ensure the continuation of a community are so vital to the human
psyche that cultures everywhere have developed some
form of enactment. Since these activities predate
recorded history and leave no tangible trace, the precise
origins of theatre are cloaked in mystery. Theatre most
likely evolved over time as a form of cultural expression
and has no specific moment of creation.
The use of music, dance, costumes, props, and masks
are common to ritual and theatrical performances, so
theorists have speculated that many forms of theatre
evolved from rituals. The earliest rituals were performed
to please or appease the gods who were the intended
audience, and some extant traditions today remind us
that ritual and theatre can coexist in the same form. Consider performance traditions such as the
kutiyattam from the Kerala region in
India that uses special sacred places for
performance. Actors face away from the
audience toward the shrine and the
temple deity. Attendance at a performance is also an act of worship. In Japan

In Metlakatla, Alaska, audience members join

in the dancing of this Tsimshian dance troupe
at a potlatch, a ceremony that includes feasting, music, speeches, singing, dancing, and
gifts for the guests. Such events are held to
bear witness to and celebrate a wide variety of
occasions including the payment of a debt, a
wedding, a funeral, or the building of a house.
Performance here builds and cements community relations.
Lawrence Migdale/Pix

at the Ise Shrine, the most sacred spot in Japan, priestesses of the indigenous Shinto religion perform special
dance ceremonies. Here too, audiences may come to
watch, but the performers face away from them because
the dances are meant primarily for the pleasure of the divine spectators, the Shinto gods. As the human audience
takes on increased importance, we see the movement
from sacred ritual to secular theatre.
We have evidence that ancient Greek tragedy evolved
from dithyrambs, hymns sung and danced in praise of
the god Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, and early
Greek theatres contained an altar. From the ancient
Egyptian Abydos ritual performance that hieroglyphs date
to 2500 B.C.E. to the Christian passion plays of medieval
Europe, many of the rituals associated with performance
tell tales of resurrection and renewal often connected to

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The Audience and the Actor: The Invisible Bond

The Audience and the Actor:

The Invisible Bond
Unlike a television or movie audience, the live theatre audience always participates in
some way in a performance. In fact, the level of audience participation can be anywhere
on a continuum from community creation and participation to total separation of audience and performer.

fertility and rites of spring. This indicates that theatrical

activity is linked with the continuation of community and
the affirmation of the beliefs that sustain a cultures wellbeing.
In some cultures shamans, priests or priestesses, are
charged with communicating with the spirit world on
behalf of the community to bring peace and prosperity
to the populace, or healing to the sick. They may induce spirits to possess them as part of this communication, providing their own bodies as vessels through
which spirits manifest themselves to the group. Donning a mask or costume or holding a particular object
associated with a spirit often serves as a path to possession. Shamans in a state of possession may move,
speak, and in every way act like the spirit that possesses them, an image that parallels the work of the
actor. While some shamans give themselves over to irrational powers and enter a paranormal state, others
carefully plan the elements of their
performance. It can be argued that this aesthetic consciousness turns the performance into both a theatrical
and a religious event. Such developments can be found
in Native American shamanistic rites and throughout
Asia, Australia, and Africa. The
Buryat people of Siberia and Mongolia have incorporated shamanistic elements into contemporary
theatre forms, demonstrating the
coexistence of the sacred and secular in performance.
In many cultures religious
events offer an opportunity to
enact stories from a groups
mytho-historical past. Such presentations may be necessary to ensure
the health of the community and
its members or to effect a particular transitionan individuals passage from childhood to adulthood,
such as the Apache puberty
drama, or a seasonal shift from
winter to spring. They may serve
as a means of passing on oral her-

itage or perpetuating values and beliefs, and as a form

of communal and sacred entertainment.
Some scholars believe that the roots of theatre lie in
storytelling, a universal cultural activity that passes on a
communitys shared cultural experiences and knowledge.
Entertaining narrators naturally embellish their tales by
taking on the voices, facial expressions, and mannerisms
of different characters, and may even add props, costume pieces, and physical movement to help bring the
action to life. Through these additions, storytelling blossoms into theatrical presentation.
Some suggest that the origins of theatre lie in
dance, where physical movement and mimed action
gave expression to ideas before developed language.
Early expressive movement in imitation of animals and
people may have led to further transformations and
elaborations, and later to dramatic content. The presence of dance in ritual links it to the development of
theatre.
It is unlikely that any single practice gave birth to
the theatre, which embraces all of these elements and is
influenced by so many traditions. It is more constructive
to understand the development of theatrical activity
as a movement along a continuum
in response to the needs of communities to express their deepest concerns, to teach their members, and
to ensure the communitys survival
through performance.

At this Buddhist Tsam festival in Himachal Pradesh, India, monks wearing

papier mach masks and ornate costumes represent Guru Padmasambhava
and his Eight Emanations. In India,
Tibet, Nepal, and Mongolia, monks perform masked dances as part of their sacred duties.
Lindsay Hebberd/CORBIS

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Scholars believe that many forms of theatre evolved from religious ritual in which
everyone present was a participant and the intended audience was the invisible divinity.
When one member of the group first steps out of a communal role to perform for the
others, theatre appears in its embryonic form. By claiming the role of the actor, the performer also creates the audience. Over time, as the roles become more clearly divided by
functionaudience, performer, playwrightwe have the development of the theatrical
form. In this model, theatre is deeply tied to its communal roots, with the actor and the
audience emerging from the same tightly knit group and held together by an invisible
bond. In some ways, the theatre is always about communitythe community of artists
that create it, the community of spectators that observe it, and the union of both groups
in the moment of performance.
Even today, when the roles of actor and audience feel so distinct, they are still
codependent in the creation of theatre. Actors on stage can feel the audiences reactions and consciously or unconsciously adjust the performance accordingly. If the audience is laughing, an actor will wait until the laughter has died down to speak the
next line. If the audience is quiet and unresponsive, an actor might unconsciously push
or work harder to get the audience to react. An unexpected noise such as the ring of
a cellphone or a sneeze might cause an actor to lose focus for a moment. In many
performance traditions in which participation of the community is required, actors
may direct all their energy toward heightening the audience involvement. Theatre performers are always playing in relation to the audience as its members laugh, cry, sigh,
and breathe together. The live actoraudience interaction is one of the special thrills
of the theatre for both performers and spectators, and it pulls actors back to the theatre despite lucrative film careers.

The Audience Is a Community

In some places around the world, the audience still comes from a tightly knit community linked by shared values and history outside the theatre. In other places, when
you take a seat in a theatre auditorium, or gather around street performers, or join a
dancing crowd, you become part of a temporary community tied together only for the
duration of the performance. Either way, this assimilation into a group empowers you.
You can influence the actions of others around you, and they can influence yours. We
all have felt how much easier it is to be openly responsive when we are part of a crowd
than when we are alone. Imagine screaming at a sporting event if you were the only
spectator. You are more likely to laugh out loud when others are laughing as well.
There is a special freedom that comes from being an audience member, just as there
are special constraints.
Many factors can affect the degree of interaction among audience members. The
spacial configuration of the theatre and lighting can contribute to a heightened awareness of other peoples responses. Performances outdoors in daylight tend to make us
feel part of a crowd. But even in darkened theatres with the audience all facing the
stage, we can sense an atmosphere in the housethe term theatre people use for
the collective audiencethat sets an emotional mood of the spectators. It is so palpable that performers can feel the audience even before a performance begins. Stage
managers often report backstage before curtain that it feels like a good house tonight,
commenting on the invisible currents of energy circulating among the audience members. Actors can sense the audience as a group from the stage immediately, and they
adjust their performances accordingly. The audience is the one thing that changes completely every night, and because of the interplay between actor and audience, no two
performances are ever exactly alike.

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Audience Members Construct Meaning as Individuals

Audience Members Construct

Meaning as Individuals
Although the audience is usually addressed as a group by theatre artists, an audience, like
any community, is made up of individuals with varying backgrounds and points of view.
In close-knit societies, with shared values and histories, the differences among audience
members may be less marked, but nonetheless, no two people bring the same set of life
experiences to a performance, and each audience member perceives a theatrical event
through a personal lens. Because audiences are collections of individuals with different
pasts, every audience will respond in a unique way.
Our personal histories always influence how we react as audience members in many
ways. If you are watching a performance from a culture outside of your own, you may
not understand its nuances, or point of view, or performance style. If you have recently
gone through a traumatic event such as the death of a parent, you might have a particularly strong or empathetic reaction to a play addressing this subject. If you are seeing a
play or a performance tradition you have studied, you will measure this production
against how you imagined it. If you are an experienced theatre-goer, you might not be as
impressed by a lavish set or spectacular scenic change as a novice would. If you are attending a play that you have already seen, you may find yourself comparing the interpretations, directing, acting, and design. All of these individual experiences will affect
your response, just as taking this class will probably make you a very different audience
member in the future.

Personal Identity and the Construction of Meaning

Our personal histories, including our age, culture, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, education, and economic or social class, play a part in our response to a performance. Usually theatre attempts to bridge the space between audience members personal
experience and the content of a performance through the creation of empathy, the capacity to identify emotionally with the characters on stage. Sometimes theatre artists

Photo 2.1
In this production of The
Blacks: A Clown Show by Jean
Genet, levels of reality were confused as the blackwhite political conflict that is the subject of
this play is realized through the
direct confrontation of white
audience members by black actors. This action reversed the
traditional power structure between blacks and and whites.
At some performances white
spectators were traumatized by
the psychological assault of the
drama. Directed by Christopher
McElroen for the Classical
Theatre of Harlem.
Courtesy of The Classical Theatre
of Harlem, Inc., photo by Richard
Termine

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Challenges and Choices

Should there be limits on
how actors treat unsuspecting audience members, especially when the action is
confrontational?

Photo 2.2
Note the images and symbols
of Chicano culture in Cherrie
Moragas Heroes and Saints at
Brava! for Women in the Arts,
San Francisco, directed by Albert Takazauckas. Actors: Hector Correa and Jaime Lujan.
Courtesy of Brava Theater Center,
photo by David M. Allen

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choose to exploit these differences for social or political reasons. Whether through empathy or distance, the goal is always to increase our understanding of others like or unlike ourselves.
The Free Southern Theaters 1968 production of Slave Ship by Amiri Baraka (b.
1934; also known as Leroi Jones), enacted a history of African Americans in the United
States and deliberately divided its audience along racial lines. A symbolic slave ship was
constructed in the middle of the large playing area, with close seating on all sides. The
hold of the ship, where slave bodies were piled in cramped quarters, was eye level with
the audience, magnifying the inhuman conditions on board. During an enacted slave
auction, female slaves were stripped topless and thrust at white men in the audience, who
were asked what they thought the women were worth. Many white audience members
were so disturbed by this aggressive confrontation with history that they left at midpoint;
others wished they had. At the end of the piece, cast members, invoking black power
movements, invited black audience members to join them in encircling the white audience, while shouting for violent revolution. At many performances, black audience members, feeling empowered by the performance, joined the cast in shouting and
intimidating white spectators. Many white audience members felt threatened and angry
that they had paid to be abused, or felt helpless to express their sympathy with the blacks
in an atmosphere of hostility. This play was meant to provoke different responses from
different audience members to teach the lessons of history, and racial background could
not help but influence the audiences experience of the play. A 2003 production of Jean
Genets The Blacks by the Classical Theatre of Harlem used the same techniques to polarize the audience along racial lines and drive
home similar points (see Photo 2.1). Once again,
many white audience members were visibly shaken
by the direct confrontation.
Chicana playwright Cherrie Moraga (b. 1952)
focuses on the problems of the community of
Mexican American migrant farmworkers in California. In her play, Heroes and Saints, the bodiless
central character Cerezita represents Chicano children with birth defects from pesticides used in the
fields (see Photo 2.2). The plays treatment of homosexuality within the Chicano community interweaves sexuality with religious symbolism and
seeks to expose the oppressive aspects of Catholicism. Moraga liberally mixes English and Spanish
dialogue, reflecting the actual speech patterns of
the Chicano community. The play draws heavily
on Chicano cultural images, and audience members unfamiliar with Spanish or with the social
world Moraga depicts might feel lost or unable to
appreciate her reworking of cultural symbols.
Those familiar with that community might feel
deeply touched by the play. These charged themes
provoke different responses based on sexual preference and religiosity, even within the Chicano
community.
Eve Enslers popular play Vagina Monologues
(see Chapter 1), dealing with such an intimate part
of the female anatomy, elicits different responses
from audience members based on their gender,
even creating a sisterhood among women in the

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Audience Members Choose Focus

audience. Tim Millers work (discussed in Chapter 6) speaks directly to issues of concern
to the gay community.
Theatre experiences that address race, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, and gender seek to create awareness of the life conditions of people both like and unlike ourselves. What we take away from such provocative performances and what meaning we
construct depends on how we filter the staged events through our personal histories.
Theatre, the most public of all the arts, is also a private act with personal meaning.

Audience Members Choose Focus

At a theatrical event, individual audience members possess a certain amount of autonomy to choose their focus and to control their personal experience of a performance. A
theatre spectator sees the entire playing space and can choose to look anywhere. Lighting effects and other staging techniques can draw the audiences attention to one area or
another, but spectators can still decide whether they want to watch the actor who is
speaking or see the reaction of the actor who is listening. Where spectators choose to
focus will affect their interpretation of a performance. This puts a burden on stage actors
and directors to create a center of compelling dramatic action, which explains the heightened theatricality of stage acting. Compare this to film or television in which the director, through the camera lens, and the editor, with a cut, preselect what they want the
audience to see and from what perspective.
Some stage directors take advantage of the audiences visual autonomy. They create
productions with many stages and many events occurring at the same time and ask the
audience to choose its own focus time and again. In Richard Schechners (b. 1934) work
with environmental theatre during the 1960s and 1970s, there was no demarcation between the audience space and the performance space, and simultaneous action occurred
in many places. Actors engaged individual audience members, sometimes whispering dialogue in their ears. This required each member of the audience to actually construct the
drama based on a completely individual experience.

Photo 2.3
Note the platform stages reminiscent of fairground booths.
The audience can watch different scenes from various sides
and angles. Some audience
members stand to get a better
view of action taking place at
the opposite side of the playing
area. The Thtre du Soleil
performing 1789 directed by
Ariane Mnouchkine. Scenery
by Roberto Moscoso and costumes by Franoise Tournafond. Cartoucherie de
Vincennes, Paris, 1970.
Martine Franck/Magnum Photos

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In 19701971 the French troupe the Thtre du Soleil created 1789 in the companys
huge old ammunition factory on the outskirts of Paris. Its scenes from the French Revolution took place on five stages surrounding the audience creating a fairground atmosphere with multiple focuses. The audience chose where to look just as they might at an
outdoor fair (see Photo 2.3). One particularly poignant moment used two stages at opposite ends of the space to represent the physical and cultural distance that separated
Louis XVI, the French king, from the illiterate peasants in the countryside. While the
king proclaimed that he wanted to respond to his subjects needs, the peasants had no
means of communicating with him.

Conventions of Audience Response

When you attend the theatre, most likely you are not aware that you have entered into a
silent contract determining how you will behave during the performance and what your
relationship will be to the theatrical event and the performers. You are unaware of this
agreement because, in general, audiences conduct themselves according to time-honored
traditions that are observed by spectators and actors alike. When these rules are broken,
on purpose or by accident, as when an actor planted in the audience interrupts the stage
action or an audience member leaps uninvited onto the stage, it can be exciting or disturbing, but it is always provocative, because it is a violation of the prevalent theatrical
conventions and audience expectations. A performance constructs its conventions of audience response through cues given by the actors, the spatial arrangement, directorial
concept, lighting, and set design. In the chapters ahead, we will look at how each of these
elements determines the role of the audience.
Although the audiences presence is a vital part of theatrical performance, the nature
of the audiences participation may vary from place to place, society to society, era to era,
and even at different kinds of events or in different venues within the same culture. At
evening performances of the opera in the Roman arena in Verona, Italy, during the overture, the audience lights small candles and the entire arena is lit up like a giant birthday
cake (see Photo 2.4). The locals in the upper tiers picnic during the performance, passing around chicken legs, salami, and wine. Those in the high-priced seats, however, behave more like opera house audiences in New York, London, or Paris, where people come
to be seen in their designer best and await intermission to sip champagne. Although eating is taboo during most performances inside opera houses and can disturb the performers and other audience members, when the New York Metropolitan Opera performs
in Central Park, audience members feel free to behave more like the audience in Verona,
picnicking on the grass and drinking wine. We see that expected audience behavior can
be different for the same kind of performance in different settings.
Around the world today, in countries outside of Western Europe and America, most
theatrical traditions expect vocal audience response of one kind or another during the
show. In the Japanese kabuki theatre, at the climactic moments of a play, the fans yell out
phrases such as Ive been waiting for this my whole life! or Do it the way your father did
it! Through this yelling they support their favorite actors, cheering them on to masterful
execution the way a baseball fan in America might yell strike him out to a pitcher during
a game. At performances of Chinese opera, whenever a performer does something praiseworthy, members of the audience will applaud and shout Hao, hao (Good, good). They
do not feel compelled to hold their applause until the end. In African concert party theatre, audience participation is expected, and spectators are invited, even drawn, into the
performance by the actors who encourage them to hiss the villains and warn them of danger. Actors may engage in a call and response with the audience by repeating simple questions about the plot for the audience to answer. When these kinds of performances are

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Photo 2.4
At the Roman Arena in Verona,
Italy, audience members play
their part in the operatic spectacle by lighting small candles
during the overture. The entire
arena is aglow in an audiencecreated lighting effect.
Photo by Gianfranco Fainello, Fondazione Arena di Verona. All rights
are exclusively reserved.

played to spectators unfamiliar with their expected role, it can feel like a rock band performing for a classical music audience. The performances can seem lifeless without the
expected audience response, and actors who have come to rely on the vocal support of
their admirers can feel let down. If you are unfamiliar with these customs, you will surely
not be able to fully appreciate a performance that depends on your interaction. You may
feel out of place or unsure how to conduct yourself. One of the most important things to
learn about the theatre is how to be an appropriate audience member.

Audience Conventions in Western

Theatre History
In Europe and America today, and in theatres in the Western tradition around the world,
most often we expect to be silent during a performance and to hold our applause until
the end. Sometime after we take our seats, the lights dim and a hush settles over the
crowd as we become quiet and attentive listeners. Although this is the prevalent convention in Western theatre today, it was not always the case.

The Once-Active Audience

The outdoor daylight performances in ancient Greece took place in a festive atmosphere
in which social interaction, eating, and drinking were all part of a daylong theatre event.
In ancient Rome, theatre was performed at religious festivals that offered an enormous
array of entertainments. Both sacred and secular, performances were meant to please the
gods as much as the human spectators. Because theatre had to compete with chariot
races and wild animal fights for its audiences attention, it was common for spectators to
walk out in the middle of a play if they thought that something more interesting might
be happening at another venue. The prologues of ancient Roman comedies often admonish the audience to pay attention to the show.

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Throughout the Middle Ages, theatre was very much a community affair. Audiences
would gather around wandering players in town squares and interact with each other
and the performers. The Christian cycle plays that began in the fourteenth century and
depicted stories from the Old and New Testaments were projects that engaged the entire
town in preparation. The audience who had shared in the creation of the piece, providing sets, costumes, props, and other needs, attended in an open spirit of camaraderie to
watch their fellow townsmen perform.
An open exchange between actors and the public was part of the spirit of the theatre
even as performances became more formal events performed by professional actors in
theatre buildings during the sixteenth century. In his own time, Shakespeares plays were
performed before a rowdy audience who booed, hissed, cheered, conversed, ate, drank,
and even threw food at the performers, offering one explanation for the rat infestation
in theatres of the period. Many believe that the open roof of the Elizabethan playhouse
was a means to let the stench of food, drink, and unwashed bodies escape. If we remember that Shakespeare wrote for a popular audience, we can appreciate the earthy humor,
double entendres, and theatrical devices that made him a crowd pleaser.
In late seventeenth-century Europe, as theatre moved increasingly indoors, the behavior of the audience was somewhat tempered, but spectators were still actively engaged
in the event. Indoor theatre in this period was a social event for an elite audience. Candelabra lit up the audience as well as the stage, and the horseshoe-shaped auditorium
made it as easy to be seen by others as to see the show. Those seated on the long sides of
the horseshoe actually had to turn their heads to the side to see the stage; when they
looked straight ahead or down, they looked at each other and could easily observe who
else was in the audience, what they were wearing, and who were their escorts, feeding the
social gossip of the time. Some spectators even sat onstage when additional seats were
added to raise revenues, bringing them even more attention.

Photo 2.5
In 1830, audience riots followed the first performance of
Victor Hugos Hernani, pictured here in a painting by Albert Besnard. Hugos romantic
play broke with the stage conventions of neoclassical
tragedy, and the romantics and
the classicists drew battle lines
as to which form should dominate. The horseshoe shape of
the theatre enabled those in the
circular balconies to communicate with the spectators in the
orchestra, facilitating the
shouting match.
Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY

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History

IN PERSPECTIVE

THE ASTOR PLACE RIOTS

uring the nineteenth century in Europe and the

United States, theatre was the peoples art. Passionate audiences protested vociferously over issues of concern from ticket prices to theatrical forms and
the treatment of stars. Some of the public outrage addressed at controversial films today would seem tame in
contrast.
Lingering American antagonism against the British and
the highbrow Americans who identified with them may
have been at the root of the violent Astor Place Riots that
erupted on May 10, 1849, at the Astor Place Opera
House in New York City, ostensibly the result of a professional rivalry between the American actor Edwin Forrest
(18061872), and the English actor William Charles
Macready (17931873). Macreadys subtle and intellectual style contrasted with Forrests vigorous acting and
muscular bearing that many felt embodied American
democratic ideals. Forrests portrayal of common heroes
like the Roman Spartacus were widely admired by popular
American audiences. The bad blood between the two actors began in 1845 during one of Forrests tours in England when, blaming Macready for his
lack of success, Forrest openly hissed
Macready during a performance. Their
simultaneous performances in New
York transplanted their animosity to the
United States and translated into a call to
arms for homegrown American culture.

Forrests admirers assailed Macready with critical

newspaper articles and threw objects at him during performances. After a disastrous opening night in New York,
when audience members threw chairs at the stage along
with the usual vegetables and fruit, Macready was ready
to return home. Persuaded by a group of powerful New
Yorkers, he continued his run in defiance of the treatment received. On hearing that Macready would continue on, Forrests supporters drummed up a nationalist
fury against the production. At the next performance the
house was full to capacity, and policemen and crowds of
thousands gathered outside the theatre in protest. When
Macready walked onstage, the gathering erupted beyond
the control of the police. The crowd outside threw
paving stones at the building and pushed to get in, and
Macready barely escaped with his life. The national
guard was called in from a nearby armory, and total
mayhem ensued when soldiers shot at the crowd. According to various accounts, the Astor Place Riots left between twenty and thirty-one dead, over one hundred
wounded, and the theatre in ruins.

In an attempt to restore order, National

Guardsmen at Astor Place shoot at rioters
throwing rocks at the theatre where the
English actor William Charles Macready
performs.
Bettmann/CORBIS

In eighteenth-century London, spectators often arrived early and entertained each

other before the show began. In his London Journal, James Boswell recounts how on one
such occasion he imitated a cow to the delight of other audience members, although they
were not as taken with his imitation of a chicken. The plays of the Restoration and early
eighteenth century, with their depiction of an artificial social world with pretentious
manners and behavior, can be seen as mirrors of the audience in the theatre.

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European plays of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries were punctuated
with dramatic devices addressed directly to the audience such as asidesshort comments that revealed a characters inner thoughts often to comic effect, soliloquies
lengthy speeches through which a character revealed state of mind, and dazzling poetic
monologues or speeches. The audience might erupt in appreciative applause after a
monologue or soliloquy, much the way they do today at the opera after an aria.
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatre, reflecting the democratic revolutions occurring in the outside world, increasingly included popular entertainments and
easily accessible drama. American audiences were some of the rowdiest of all. They exercised their democratic freedom at theatre events and brought tomatoes, cabbages, and
rotten eggs with them to throw at the actors if they didnt like the performance. Sometimes they tore up the seats, throwing those as well, and on occasion they were moved to
riot. At a good performance they cheered ecstatically and cried out for encores; an actor
would have to repeat a speech as many times as the crowd demanded.

The Rise of the Passive Audience

With this long history of involved audiences, how did it come to pass that today, in Western Europe and the Americas, the audience is generally more passive? In fact, the quiet,
passive spectator is a relatively recent historical phenomenon and dates only from the
late nineteenth century, as a result of a theatrical style known as realism. In realistic theatre, the audience is asked to accept the stage world as a believable alternate reality where
things happen much as they would in life, and people behave in seemingly natural ways.
This is achieved when the actors conduct the lives of their characters as though the audience were not watching, in spaces designed to look like their counterparts in the real
world; in turn, the audience, representing a different reality, agrees not to intrude on the
imaginary world on the stage to preserve its perfect illusion. This creates the convention
of an invisible fourth wall separating the stage from the audience.
We should remember that realism is not any more real than any other style of theatre. In fact, actors are not talking in their everyday voices or volumes; they are not any
more like their characters than actors in nonrealistic plays; the sets and costumes are just
as artificial as those that present an abstract or poeticized style. What realism provides is
the illusion of the real, and that is as much an illusion as every other stage world. Because
realism came to dominate the American theatre, we refer to the nonrealistic theatre as
stylized; but realism is as much a stylea manner of presenting the world through accepted conventionsas any other approach to the theatre.
Realism as a style resulted from a confluence of forces: the ideas of Darwin that presented human beings as objects of scientific study; the birth of sociology and psychology
that sought to objectively observe human behavior on every social rung; a surge of playwrights interested in applying these ideas to the theatre; and advances in stage lighting
first gas and later electricthat permitted the darkening of an auditorium to separate
the audience while simultaneously shining a focused light on the stage to illuminate
human behavior as though it were under the lens of a microscope. The advances in lighting enabled the actors to move away from the front of the stage and behind the proscenium arch (see Chapter 9).
As more and more playwrights chose to write in this realistic style, it came to dominate the Western theatre, and its impact on acting, directing, and design can be seen to
this day. Theatre architecture altered to reflect social change and to facilitate this new approach. The horseshoe shape for theatres was abandoned in favor of a theatre in which all
the seats faced forward, focusing the audience on the stage and altering its relationship to
the performance. Economic motives pushed theatre managers to place upholstered armchair seating in front of the stage in the pit, in what we now call the orchestra section.
Where rowdy lower class spectators once stood or sat on backless benches, wealthier audiences now sat in expensive reserved seating, changing the atmosphere in the theatre.

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Aesthetic Distance
Peculiarly, the more the conventions of realism separated the audience from the actors,
and the more passively the audience watched, the more they lost their aesthetic distance,
the ability to observe a work of art with a degree of detachment and objectivity. Realism
drew audiences into the performance. The presentation of a world so like their own, inhabited by characters whose concerns and problems so closely paralleled their own experience, heightened the level of audience identification and emotional involvement with the
characters on the stage. Styles other than realism still provide a constant reminder of the
fiction before us, and this awareness enables us to separate psychologically from the work.
Every theatrical experience sets up an emotional relationship with the audience that
is regulated by theatrical convention. This can range from icy dispassion to overwhelming emotional involvement. Some amount of distance is always necessary; without it, we
would be unable to discern that the events unfolding on the stage are a fiction and that
the actors are really playing characters who live only for the duration of the performance.
Distance maintains the audiences sanity, or else we would all be leaping onto the stage
to stop Romeo from killing himself. Theatre critics from Plato to the present have debated the importance of aesthetic distance and its moral implications. Many have feared
that exposing the audience to violent or sexually explicit acts and offensive language can
foster such behavior. Others have argued that aesthetic distance permits a purging of our
aggressive desires through art and enactment. Aristotle (384322 B.C.E.) referred to this
emotional release as catharsis. These concerns are echoed in todays discussions of violence in the media.

Rebelling against Realisms Passive Audience

As soon as realism became an accepted convention, the continuing cycle of tradition giving way to innovation produced experimental artists on a divergent course. From the
turn of the twentieth century on, theatre practitioners have been seeking ways to tear
down realisms fourth wall and reengage the audience in performance, creating new sets
of conventions in the process. Some have simply sought ways to reinvigorate the stage,
such as Thornton Wilders use of a character called the Stage Manager who speaks directly to the audience as he sets the scene, narrates events, and introduces the characters
of Our Town. Other theatre practitioners manipulate aesthetic distance for their own political or aesthetic ends. Avant-garde theatre artists have even toyed with the audiences
aesthetic distance, confusing them as to what is real and what is pretend, which is an unsettling experience. In The Last Supper (2002), Ed Schmidt invited the audience into his
home, promising them a wonderful dinner as part of the event. Bantering with the audience in seemingly unscripted remarks as he cooks in his kitchen, he realizes hes forgotten to defrost the fish and has run out of ingredients. The audience settles for cheese
and crackers while he orders out for pizza. Sitting in the intimacy of the actors home
with real rumbling stomachs, the audience could not distinguish where the real person
left off and the role began and were baffled as to what was true and what was false, raising questions about perceptions of reality.

Political Theatre: Moving the

Audience to Action
Playwrights have used the theatre for political commentary as far back as the ancient
Greek comic playwright Aristophanes (448c. 380 B.C.E.), who satirized the people and
institutions of ancient Athens. However, in the early twentieth century, a different kind

Challenges and Choices

Is the witnessing of violent
and disturbing images and
language onstage so
provocative that it requires
government regulation, or
should audience members
be left to regulate their own
aesthetic distance?

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Photo 2.6
Calavera drums up an audience for a Teatro Campesino
performance in Fresno, circa
1969. Pictured: Feliz Alvarez,
Chale Martinez, Manuel Pickett, Lupe Valdez, Phil Esparza.
Courtesy of El Teatro Campesino

of political theatre aimed at activating audiences for social change in the real world took
root. Such political theatre places special demands on its audience, as its goal is to spur
them to real action. Practitioners experiment with strategies for audience activation
adapted to specific circumstances and political goals.

Agit-Prop: Activating the Audience

Agit-prop (from agitation and propaganda) was an early form of political theatre developed during the 1920s in Russia and later adopted abroad. Born in the Marxist fervor of
the Russian Revolution, it supported the workers struggle for political, social, and economic justice. In the spirit of the ancient town criers, agit-prop brought the days news
to illiterate peasants and factory workers to enlist their support for the massive economic
and social changes in the aftermath of the revolution. As songs and skits on relevant issues were added, these presentations grew into living newspapers. Agit-prop reached
out to its audiences, playing where ordinary people gathered, in workers cafes and community halls, expressing important information in a short, simple, explicit, and entertaining way.
Agit-prop became a model for political theatre in many countries. German troupes
such as the Red Megaphone incorporated group declamatory speeches and cabaret-style
skits into their performances. During the Spanish Civil War (19361939), players used
agit-prop to inspire the people to fight against fascism. The Federal Theatre Project, organized to provide jobs for unemployed theatre artists during the Great Depression in
the United States, performed Living Newspapers from 1935 to 1939. These used documentary material to inform the American public of pressing social concerns. In the
1960s, groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino used
agit-prop techniques to fight for civil rights, for immigrants rights, and against the Vietnam War. The Mime Troupe mixed the didacticism of agit-prop with popular American
and European theatrical forms like vaudeville, commedia dellarte, and circus clowning to
create extended outdoor plays that brought home a political message and urged the audience to adopt a position. Teatro Campesino, a Chicano group founded by Luis Valdez
(b. 1940), brought theatre to immigrant farmworkers by performing in churches and on

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the back of a flat-bed truck in crop fields in short plays called actos, improvised skits that
explained to Californias immigrant farmworkers why they should join the Farm
Workers Union and demand better conditions. Many actos ended with the actors exhorting the audience to call for La Huelga (a strike). The performances were accompanied by Chicano songs that served to disseminate information, much like the early
Russian living newspapers.

Bertolt Brecht: Challenging the Audience

Throughout the world, theatre artists look to the work of the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht (18981956) for a model of how to engage the audience. Brecht
wanted to turn his audience members into critical viewers who, like fans at a sporting
event, would think about what they were seeing, take sides, comment on the action, and
come up with alternative courses of action.
Brecht built on the work of German director Erwin Piscator (18931966), an early
pioneer in political theatre who developed a series of stage devices that increased the audiences aesthetic distance and prevented them from becoming emotionally absorbed in
the play, so they could see the political issues more clearly. Piscator abolished fourth wall
realistic stage sets that had come to be the standard, and replaced them with slide projections, film, and placards naming time and location, often providing a historical backdrop for contemporary issues.
Brecht extended these ideas. Mood lighting was replaced by utilitarian illumination
to provide visibility. He revealed the means of creating theatrical illusion, such as light
fixtures, ropes, and pulleys to keep the audience fully aware that they were watching a
theatrical event. Brecht wrote plays (which we will discuss in the next chapter) that could
utilize these staging techniques. The action is interrupted by narratives, projections, and
songs that comment on the situation and whose music and content are frequently jarringly dissonant. The finales of his plays often leave the situation unresolved or directly
ask the audience to come up with a resolution. Brecht worked with a troupe to develop
a style of acting that could enable the actor to comment on the character, not become the
character.

Photo 2.7
The map that serves as backdrop and the puppet-like figure of Hitler are both devices
that create a distancing effect
in this production of Bertolt
Brechts Schweyk in the Second
World War directed by Richard
Eyre at the Olivier Theatre,
London.
ArenaPal/Topham/The Image
Works

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Through these and other techniques, Brecht hoped to achieve what he called the
verfremdungseffekt, translated as distancing or alienation effect, a separation of the audience emotionally from the dramatic action. The audience is thus an observer, able to
decide the best course of action to resolve social ills. As politically motivated theatre
practitioners around the world adopted Brechts methods, these devices became a part of
our theatrical vocabulary and no longer have the same startling effect on audiences;
artists therefore continue to look for new techniques and strategies.

Augusto Boal: Involving the Audience

Brazilian theatre theorist and practitioner Augusto Boal (b. 1930) extended Brechts ideas
in his theatre of the oppressed, a theatrical form in which all barriers between actors and
audience are destroyed, returning theatre to its communal roots in which we can all become participants in social drama. He turns passive spectators into active spect-actors
who dont just think about alternative solutions, but try them out onstage as rehearsals
for social revolution.
Under the umbrella of the Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal developed different theatrical strategies for different situations and audiences. In forum theatre, members of
a community create a short piece about shared problems that they perform for other
spect-actors who are invited to stop the show at any time, take over roles, and try out
new solutions. In his invisible theatre, provocative dramas about burning issues are enacted in normal everyday settings like subway cars or restaurants, as if they were happening in real life. The unsuspecting public, unaware that the action is rehearsed and
planned, unwittingly join the debate or action and become actors themselves. In one
piece performed on a boat in Sweden, a young woman pretended to be pregnant and
in labor to catalyze a discussion about the shortcomings of the health care system.
During a term spent as a city councilman in Brazil, Boal worked on legislative theatre,
a form of forum theatre designed to reveal issues of primary concern to the community to guide political policy.
Boals Theatre of the Oppressed was originally designed to reach the poor of Brazil,
but now there are centers for the dissemination of his methods all over the world. Local
practitioners throughout South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa have adapted his
methods to their pressing social problems and audiences. In the more bourgeois cultures
of the United States, Europe, and Canada, Boals ideas have been used psychotherapeutically to address the oppressive forces within our psyches, drawing on a collection of
techniques called The Rainbow of Desire.

The Living Theatre: Confronting the Audience

During the 1960s many theatrical groups in the United States and abroad spoke out
against the Vietnam War and sought new ways to galvanize their audiences against the
war and the political-industrial complex that supported it. One of the most innovative
and influential groups was The Living Theatre, founded by Judith Malina (b. 1926) and
Julien Beck (19251985). The company has a long history of important productions, beginning with their staging of Jack Gelbers drama about drug addiction, The Connection
in 1959, and Kenneth Browns The Brig in 1963, which placed a mesh fence between the
audience and the dehumanizing action of military prisons depicted onstage. The group
lived out their anarchist politics by moving to Europe and living as a nomadic collective.
They created Paradise Now in 1968 to make audiences aware of the restraints social and
political institutions imposed on individual freedom and to conscript spectators into renouncing these structures in favor of building an alternative paradise community.
Goading audience members to shake them from their complacency, the group used

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Performance

IN PERSPECTIVE

ADAPTING POLITICAL
STRATEGIES TO LOCAL
AUDIENCES
In countries the world over, political theatre groups develop strategies and find theatrical forms that can speak
to local audiences and issues. When the Peruvian troupe
Yuyachkani discovered that its early pieces about land
reform and miners strikes did not connect with its audiences, its director Miguel Rubio incorporated traditional
celebrations, masks, songs, dances, and costumes from
the communities of miners and peasants they sought to
activate. They now begin a show with a fiesta that is
interrupted by a dramatic conflict.
The Parivartan Theatre Project in the tribal area of
Khedbrahma in Gujarat, India, uses local villagers as performers and incorporates traditional songs and folk theatre conventions to address tribal attitudes toward
women and issues of domestic violence, dowry death,
and infanticide, which plague the region. The first part of
a presentation enacts a well-known folk tale related to
the treatment of women, and the second part retells the
story in a contemporary context. The players go from
house to house to announce the show and after the
presentation disperse into the crowd to discuss the play
with the villagers in small groups.
Sistern, a theatre collective in Jamaica, presents plays
in Creole by and for working-class women on topics such
as womens work, incest, poverty, and violence against
women. In their workshops they use
improvisation, oral histories, traditional
ring games, folk tales, and other techniques to address problems, find solutions, and turn the womens
experiences into educational performances. Their 1978 production
Bellywoman Bangarang, about
teenage pregnancy, was staged in the
audience as a further means of reaching out to spectators.

Yuyachkani grabs the attention of villagers in Quinua, Peru with festive costumes, musicians, and stiltwalkers.
Courtesy of Casa Yuyachkani, Peru

In times of political repression and censorship, a special bond can form between theatres and their audiences
as artists seek to be the communitys mouthpiece. Under
President Suhartos oppressive dictatorship, Indonesias
N. Riantiarno and his group, Teater Koma, addressed
Jakartas urban middle class and critiqued contemporary
society and politics in a blend of Western-style structured
scripts, Brechtian aesthetics, and musical theatre with influences from Indonesias indigenous and more improvisational folk forms. In Time Bomb (Bom Waktu, 1982),
audiences watched the struggles of Jakartas urban slum
dwellers play out underneath a fancy restaurant where
wealthy diners eat a sumptuous meal. In the Philippines
under Ferdinand Marcoss martial law and severe theatrical censorship (19721986), amateur groups, student
groups, and professional urban and rural theatres all took
an active role in denouncing the regimes corruption and
use of torture. In 1979 PETA (The Philippine Educational
Theatre Association) transformed the folk pannuluyan,
a Christmastime street procession in which Joseph and
Mary search for an inn. In their version, seeing the slum
conditions, Joseph and Mary join forces with the downand-out of the city. In 1984, on Human Rights Day, students and faculty from the University of the Philippines
performed The Nations Oratorio (Ortoroyo Ng Bayan).
While the audience sang and chanted, the actors read
out articles from the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, enacting scenes that illustrated its abuse under
the current regime.

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Artists

IN PERSPECTIVE

In Their Own Words

BILL TALEN, AKA
REVEREND BILLY
Bill Talen is the author and actor who performs as the
televangelist Reverend Billy. He began as a sidewalk
preacher in Times Square in the late 1990s, to fight
against the Disneyfication of the neighborhood. Since
then, he and his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir have
toured a range of transnational chain stores, especially
Wal-Mart and Starbucks, to preach against mindless consumerism and the eradication of small local businesses.
He was arrested and sentenced to jail for his performance inside a Los Angeles Starbucks in 2004.

How did you come to a form of theatre that involves

audience participation?

Before I began to walk out into the audience to touch

people on their heads and hands, I was always fascinated
with the sounds and seat shiftings an audience makes.
When I was a regular stage actor, and then later a monologuist/storyteller, I would listen to the sounds of the audience as if it was a single bodyall those sighs and
unconscious chuckles and levels of breathing.

How do you get reluctant audiences to participate?

The notion of the audiences involvement in our Stop

Shopping rituals speaks to a general hunger for a group
spirituality that eludes fundamentalism. One mark of fundamentalism, whether from organized religion or the
most powerful church of all, The Church of Consumption, is the absence of any humor. If you pretend that
you know all the answers to the questions of life and

Challenges and Choices

What is the audiences responsibility to the event?
Must audience members
accept the conventions of
a performance, or can they
refuse to participate as the
show prescribes?

death, you cant joke about them. In the anarcho-faith

that we prefer, serious questions of life and death are just
hilarious. The reluctance to shout Amen! or Changea-lujah! is difficult to maintain when people all around
you are laughing. That is how the community is created,
through the ritual sharing of the joke and the defeat of
socializing seriousness. In our service nowadays, this
mockery lasts a few seconds. All we need is the cultural frame, which we then break and get on to more
complex matters.

Did art drive your politics or politics drive your art?

Desperation at the Disneyfication of my neighborhood

in Times Square was the driving force. In more recent
years, the onslaught of Wal-Mart and Starbucksand
after 9/11, Halliburton, and Bechtelhave aroused
whatever we have left for our own defenseall the art
or politics we can muster. But no one has time to stop
and name one gesture artful and one bit of writing
political. Transnational capitalists come at you, so to
save your community you have to drop those categories of theater, politics, and religion, and just resist
with all youve got.
Now we perform inside stores, in actions that we call
retail interventions. It could be argued that politics
drove this decision because going undercover, and inside,
is behind the lines. (And anyway, theres no place to
protest outside, anymore.) But it could also be called
more artful because there is no theatrical space more
charged than a retail store in the Land of Consumption.

Do your performances spawn other grassroots

activism efforts?

There are Stop Shopping churches throughout the world.

We stream sermons and songs through the church website, Revbilly.com. We try to make place by creating

inflammatory political statements that brought spectators to their feet, and sometimes to
the top of their seats, screaming back in anger. Company members then invited spectators to join them onstage and in their nomadic, tribal lifestyle.
The work of the Living Theatre became famous and inspired many theatre artists of
the 1960s and after to adapt the groups techniques for their own purposes. The Living
Theatre is still held up as an important example of engaged theatre and continues to perform today with pieces such as Not in My Name, a ritualistic action against the death
penalty, enacted in Times Square in New York City on the eve of every state execution.
In this piece, performers confront passers-by individually, avowing that they themselves
will never kill and asking spectators for the same commitment, continuing their use of
direct encounter to motivate an end to violence.

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meta-communities through ritual resistance. We will

ask all the church members in Melbourne to go to the 36
Starbucks there and put their hands on the cash registers
and videotape themselves while they recite prayerfully
the first paragraph of Chapter 3 of Jane Jacobss Death
and Life of Great American Cities. Then we stream this
through the website to the faithful on other continents,
who are watching this on their computers inside Starbucks. Finally, the churchgoers from the rest of the world
perform their simultaneous reply. They also enact the
Jane Jacobs sacred text, and their hands are also on the
cash register, but we have asked them to do so in an
Aussie accent if they can, as a signal of fondness. They
loved it in Melbourne.

when the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir steps off the

bus. On the other hand, transnational capital, while so
widely discredited, still expands and destroys. Revolution no longer has a Winter Palace to storm, or a
Berlin Wall to tear down. Transnational capital, the
great displacer, is everywhere and nowhere. It dazzles
you and it dulls you. It comes at you in pixels, and secret police, and ten-story-high supermodels. We have
to make defending our own neighborhoods, and our
own psychological selves, as dramatic as the revolutions
that come to us from history.

What long-term impact do you

think your performances have on
audience members?

We have larger live audiences

now. People in Barcelona and
London and California seem ready
for their credit card exorcism

Reverend Billy with supporters

preaching against the evils of
Starbucks at the New York Halloween
parade.
Copyright 2004 Fred Askew Photography. All
rights reserved.
Source: Used with permission of Bill Talen, aka Rev. Billy.

Engaging the Audience Today

Today a new breed of activist artists is expanding on the methods of these pioneers to engage spectators in political activism responsive to contemporary issues. The Internet has
provided a rapid way to contact large groups of participants and to call them to theatrical political action telling them when and where to show up. Reclaim the Streets, a group
boasting participants in New York, London, and around the globe, turns street corners
and subway cars into spontaneous parties to reclaim overregulated open spaces for general public use. Some performer-participants get messages via the Internet, while others
simply become part of the show by walking down the street. The Surveillance Camera
Players raise awareness of the loss of privacy in our daily lives by performing short, silent

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pieces in public for surveillance cameras. Their performances point out the unobtrusive
cameras that watch our every move.
At his Church of Stop Shopping, Bill Talen performs in the guise of Reverend Billy,
a preacher who speaks out against consumer culture. Performances are mock revival
meetings with left-wing politics rather than religion as their theme. During the course of
his shows, Reverend Billy asks audience members to practice stop-shopping techniques
such as discarding their credit cards. At the end of every piece, Reverend Billy leads the
audience outside the theatre to take action in the real world. His audiences have walked
to a community garden under threat by corporate development and planted seeds, and
marched with him to picket the local Starbucks that had forced out neighborhood stores.
Reverend Billys audience participation teaches spectators how grassroots activism can
help local people take back control of their neighborhoods.

From P rovocation to Mainstream:

The Evolution of a Convention
Although experimental and political theatre artists in the twentieth century first used audience participation as a form of rebellion against the passive bourgeois audience and
other theatrical conventions of realism, tamer forms followed. The idea of the active
spectator eventually left the realm of the avant-garde and became a firmly established
convention.
Productions such as Off-Off-Broadways Tony and Tinas Wedding (1988) treat audience members as guests at a wedding. They attend the church ceremony and walk as a
group to the reception where they sit at tables and eat a full dinner, complete with champagne, as they watch Tony and Tinas family relationships explode around them. A far cry
from agit-prop theatre, the event is a fun night out and a novel date for both dinner and

Photo 2.8
Original cast members, Rachel
Benbow Murdy as Mia and
Anna Wilson as Sander, perform among the audience in
The Donkey Show, club El
Flamingo, New York. Note the
lively interaction with the involved crowd. Randy Weiner
and Diane Paulus, creators and
writers.
Courtesy of and special thanks to
Randy Weiner, Creator and Writer
of THE DONKEY SHOW, Diane
Paulus, Creator and Director of
THE DONKEY SHOW and Keira
Fromm Resident Director of Project
400 Theater Group and THE DONKEY SHOW.

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a show that has now become a national franchise with a website, gift certificates, and
commercial performances in cities around the United States. The unusual way the production asks the audience to participate in the show continues to attract audiences.
The Donkey Show (1999), a retelling of Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream
using disco songs from the 1970s in place of Shakespeares dialogue, also incorporates the
audience into the action. Staged in an old disco club, the action takes place around spectators who are encouraged to buy drinks and dance just as they would at a club. The audience configuration continually changes as actors dance, sing, and perform moving
through the crowd on a series of platforms. The dance party in the audience continues
throughout the show, and on some nights goes on long after the actors have changed out
of their costumes and gone home. The audience in this production hedonistically indulges their own pleasures as they mix with the actors.
Such mainstream performances demonstrate that what was once a defiant radical
strategy to overturn prevailing conventions can evolve into a popular and accepted theatrical form. The participatory audience has entered our general culture as well, spawning interactive art in museums, galleries, and on the Internet.

Meeting Theatres Challenges

Although we often think of the theatre as a place of entertainment, the theatre poses special challenges to its audience. In the theatre, you must be attentive as you decide where
to focus, or you will miss significant information. Theatre often depends on language
more than a visual medium like film and therefore demands good listening skills. Sometimes you will be confronted by an unexpected theatrical styledifficult language, stylized movement, strange sets, and costumes might seem jarringand you will need to
remain open and try to adjust to the new form and how it communicates. Theatre, unlike television, is often imagistic and metaphorical, so the most important thing to bring
to the theatre is your imagination.
Some productions ask spectators to make a special commitment by challenging
them physically, emotionally, or intellectually. So-called marathon performances may

Photo 2.9
For this production of Faust,
heavy demands were placed on
the audience. Note the audience members standing and
surrounding the action and the
orange curtains that separate
the playing spaces used for alternate scenes. The audiences
frequent migrations between
the spaces forced them to continually reorganize themselves,
fostering social interactions.
Goethes Faust, Parts I and II,
directed by Peter Stein, Berlin,
Germany.
Ruth Walz

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Photo 2.10
Members of the Montana
Shakespeare in the Parks company bring their performances
to remote areas around the
state and are housed by local
families. Featured here is a performance of Tartuffe in Poker
Jim Butte. The audience travels
long distances to partake of
this cultural event
Ted Wood

www.ablongman.com/felner1e

be six, eight, or twelve hours long. German director

Peter Steins (b. 1937) 2000 production of Goethes
Faust took on the whole work, rarely performed in
its entirety, for a twenty-hour event. The audience
faced more than the challenge of length. The space
was divided into two playing areas. For each scene,
the audience was shuffled back and forth between
the two spaces, which were reconfigured every
twenty to sixty minutes. The seating arrangement
changed several times and the audience was even
expected to stand for a particular portion (see
Photo 2.7). Navigating the performance became
one of the demands placed on the audience.
The six-hour Rwanda 94 (1999), created by the
Belgian company Groupov along with artists from
Rwanda, also challenged its audience with more
than length, by addressing the horrors of the Tutsi
genocide and Hutu massacre that took place in
Rwanda in 1994. Video images of dead bodies
hacked by machetes and an account of events by a
woman whose children and husband were murdered were all part of the piece. Audiences were
challenged to deal with these emotional presentations as they learned more about the causes of the
violence, including the role played by European and
American powers.
Sometimes the journey to a production becomes a challenge in and of itself. The Thtre du
Soleils location in the woods of Vincennes requires
a trip to the last stop on the Paris metro and transportation from there to the theatre on a special theatre shuttle bus. Arriving at night, through the
woods, to the theatres courtyard, illuminated with
tiny lights that bedeck the trees, is a magical experience in itself that prepares the spectator for the rest. As more and more urban theatre groups are priced out of downtown
space, performances are occurring in out-of-the-way places and seedy areas, and making
the trip becomes a test of faith in the product. Many who live in remote regions consider
a theatrical event worthy of a pilgrimage. The annual tour of Montana Shakespeare in
the Parks takes it to remote areas of the state, where ranchers and other locals from as far
as one hundred miles make the journey on winding gravel roads to small towns like
Poker Jim Butte to participate in a rare opportunity for live theatre. Actors are housed
and fed by members of the community, who regard the troupes arrival as an opportunity for culture and fun.
Attendance at the theatre is demanding, but it is also rewarding. As audience members, you have the power to choose your focus, engage emotionally and intellectually, express your response, and have your presence felt and acknowledged by the artist. These
are part of the special thrill of being in a theatre audience. Some theatre pieces affect you
deeply and cause you to undergo a transformation that may affect your life. Opening
yourself to new theatrical experiences and what they proffer is the true challenge and
pleasure of being a member of a theatre audience.

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KEY IDEAS

The audiences presence is vital to the theatrical experience. The immediate interaction between actor and audience is one of the special thrills of live performance.
The presence and participation of the audience reflects
the theatres communal roots in ritual. When you join
the audience, you become part of a unique, temporary
community.
Audience members also respond to the theatre as individuals influenced by their own personal histories. Ethnicity, religion, race, class, or gender can divide or unite
an audience.
Unlike film audiences, theatre audiences choose their
focus.
Conventions of audience response and participation
vary from place to place, throughout history, and even
from one production to another. These conventions

may be inherited through tradition or set up by a

production.
Aesthetic distance is the ability to observe a work of art
with a degree of detachment and objectivity. Artists
manipulate aesthetic distance for their own ends.
Political theatre places special demands on its audience,
challenging and confronting their beliefs to spur them
to real action.
Over time conventions evolve and radical new relationships between the audience and performers can become
traditional arrangements.
Theatre can challenge its audience physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
Opening ourselves to new theatrical experiences and
what they proffer is the true challenge and pleasure of
being a member of a theatre audience.